Cited, Not Cancelled

The news from Tel Aviv this week arrived as a single number. In the QS World University Rankings for 2027, Tel Aviv University placed 208th in the world, first among Israel’s institutions, a little ahead of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at 218 and the Technion at 334. More than fifteen hundred universities were assessed. MIT, Stanford and Oxford filled the summit, as they tend to.

Reported that way, the story is a shrug. A respectable placing, no triumph, the familiar middling band Israeli universities have occupied for years. Read the small print, though, and a far more interesting figure appears. In citations per faculty — the measure of how often the rest of the world’s scholars actually reach for your research and build on it — Tel Aviv ranked 29th on the planet. Not 29th in its region. Twenty-ninth in the world.

That gap between 208 and 29 is the whole story, and it is worth understanding why it exists.

A global ranking is not one measurement but a bundle of them, weighted and blended. The single heaviest component is academic reputation, worth 30 per cent of the score and drawn from a survey of more than 150,000 academics asked, in effect, which universities they admire. Add employer reputation, and these two surveys of opinion account for nearly half the total. Citations are something else. Worth a fifth of the score and counted from the Scopus database, they are not a poll but a record of use. A scholar in Seoul or São Paulo who cites a Tel Aviv paper is not paying a compliment; she is conceding that she could not do her own work without it.

The distinction matters more for Israel than for almost anyone else, because sentiment is precisely the thing that can be organised against you. For two decades, and with new ferocity since the war in Gaza, campaigns have urged academics around the world to shun Israeli universities — to boycott their conferences, decline their journals, strike their names from collaborations. Reputation surveys are the soft tissue through which that pressure travels. If enough colleagues are persuaded to withhold their good opinion, a number on a spreadsheet duly falls. Some of Israel’s slippage in these tables, year on year, lives exactly there, in the reputation column rather than in any decline of the work itself.

Citations are harder to boycott, because they are harder to fake and harder to refuse. A sceptic will object that the count flatters medicine and the life sciences, where the world cites most heavily, and the raw numbers do. But QS normalises each of its five broad fields separately, weighing a chemistry paper against chemistry and a humanities monograph against its own kind. Tel Aviv reaches 29th after that correction, not before it.

What does that placing actually mean? Consider a single Tel Aviv paper. In 1995 two of the university’s statisticians, Yoav Benjamini and Yosef Hochberg, published a method for separating real findings from false alarms when thousands of results are tested at once. They called it the false discovery rate, and today no geneticist scanning a genome, no laboratory reading a brain scan, works without it. The paper has been cited more than a hundred thousand times. Somewhere this morning a researcher who would not dream of setting foot at an Israeli conference is using it anyway, because the alternative is to get the answer wrong. The boycott reaches the survey. It does not reach the footnote.

Consider the scale. This is a country of some ten million people, just emerging from two years of war, its universities having spent that time absorbing reservists called from their laboratories and students from their desks. That such a country places a university 29th in the world for the sheer usefulness of its research is not a quirk of the data. It is the headline the headline missed.

None of this is new. The Hebrew University was conceived before there was a state to house it; its cornerstone was laid on Mount Scopus in 1918, and when it opened in 1925 the names attached to it included Einstein, Freud, Buber and Weizmann. The Technion is older still, its first stone set in 1912, with Einstein founding its first support society and planting, on a visit in 1923, a palm tree that stands in Haifa to this day. These were institutions built by a people who raised lecture halls before they had borders. Three Technion scientists have since taken Nobel Prizes in chemistry. The project was always, at bottom, a wager that ideas would outlast hostility.

So by all means note that Tel Aviv is 208th, and that the headline trend for Israeli higher education has been gently downward. But understand what is moving and what is not. What moves is the weather of opinion, and opinion can be lobbied, marshalled and turned. What holds is the citation — the cold, unsentimental admission, entered hundreds of thousands of times a year by people who may not wish Israel well, that the work is indispensable.

A university can be disliked and still be cited. Israel’s are discovering, again, that the second of those is the one that lasts. You can decline to applaud. You cannot, it turns out, decline to learn.